Originally posted on The Lost Lighthouse: We’ve got a new contributor in the form of Jonathan! He’s Kit’s brother. Like Kit, but also not at all like Kit. Because that is not how brothers work. Mornin’ all, I’m not Kit. Instead, I’m his brother Jonathan,…

American Ultra so easily could have been a terrible film. If the jokes had been played for easy laughs, if the actors had taken obvious choices, and if the violence had been bloodless, it would have been derivative tripe. Instead, it is one of the best films of this summer, and one of the few original ones.

The Memory Palace is not your average history podcast. If you approach it as one, you’ll be disappointed. You won’t get facts and figures, sources or statistics. Instead, you’ll hear about an event or a person as if their ending wasn’t already decided. You’ll be in the moment. You’ll hear just how much things have changed, or how little they have.

I was nervous about Inside Out. Pixar was once the king of animation, making classics like the Toy Story Trilogy, Up and Wall-E, all punctuating my adolescence with magic. But that crown slipped a little after 2010’s Toy Story 3. Starting with Cars 2 in 2011, a meritless cash-in, quickly followed by 2012’s Brave and 2013’s Monsters University, both lacking the creativity and spark for which Pixar were once famous. Worse still, The Good Dinosaur was supposed to come out in 2014, but was delayed till later this year, due to concerns that it wasn’t good enough.

Upon hearing that their next film was literally about emotions, it almost sounded like a joke, the once master heartstring-tuggers dropping all pretence and literally making a film about sadness. The cynic in me felt that Pixar was a shadow of its past self.